Why are my reward payouts about half?

Firstly, you actually have reward payouts again, else you wouldn't be asking this. Rejoice!

I have written about this before - here and here - but, as it now manifests, let me go through this briefly again.

Once the various UI/frontends update their economic codes, you should receive the same payouts in your wallet as are estimated on the various Blurt websites. So, in the near future there should be no sudden "drop" in the payouts compared to the estimates.

One of the key features of the new economic system is that it is responsive to the amount of Blurt that is actually participating in the economy - and that's vested, or powered-up, BLURT. The more BLURT is powered-up, the higher the percentage of the reward pool that gets paid out.

At the moment, this is almost exactly 50%, hence you will see your wallet payouts seem like half of what it looked like on your blog. Nothing has been "lost", just that the platforms have not as yet updated their scripts as HF5 is very new.

Notice also that the reward pool is now about 60% larger than it was a week ago. This is, of course, due to the unfortunate zero-payouts, but I expected it to grow anyway, so what we are seeing is a somewhat speeded-up version of what I thought would happen.

What we will achieve in the end is a new balance, with a larger rpool producing larger rewards that are then scaled back down to reflect the active Blurt economy. Why bother? Because this avoids the unfortunate game in play on other similar chains, whereby new members shrink the pool for existing members. In Blurt's new economy, new members who buy BLURT and power-up should be appreciated as they will slightly increase the payouts to everyone. The effects may be small and slow but they are real.

On top of this, please also notice that small BP holders now have a meaningful vote! They are no longer stuck on voting for 0.00 rewards. You can check this yourself: just try a small vote like 1%.

The third economic change can also be seen already in action. We changed the reward-curve so that it better reflects the Blurt economy in Vests. There is now a slight curve upwards, so that higher votes are worth slightly more. It should not be as dramatic as on other chains, and I will monitor this. The curation-curve has been left unchanged, as per the request of most users who expressed a preference.

Now that we know how to change the economic levers, the various formulas can be changed in the future. However, the economic game must be allowed to reach its own equilibrium. Only if it appears to be heading towards some unfortunate terminus should we intervene.

There is a Part 2 coming, but that depends on designing it and seeing whether it is best tested on Blurt or some future new chain. This is, in some ways, a preparation for it, to test that the reward pool will behave as predicted.

All of the above is predicated on current activity. I truly hope that we can encourage members to return and new members to join, so that a more vibrant environment will lead to more posting and voting and... a smaller rpool :-) And, it will also mean a higher percentage of that pool will be paid out!

Build Blurt Better!

---

Please vote for my witness account @busbecq.
Can be done directly here.
Thanks!

---